We need you Gordon Gekko!

Essay-satire


We need you Gordon Gekko!

What would Gordon Gekko have said? Probably “get a better suit,” because Gekko knows the value of appearance. In the movie, Gekko says this to a man who’s already wearing a $400 suit. But GG is not talking about passable. He thinks Brioni is that better suit. And Brioni suits, the best of Italian, wide-in-the-shoulders, narrow-in-the-waist, are gasp inducingly expensive. They were expensive in 1987 when Oliver Stone made Wall Street and they’re even more expensive now. The point? Well, maybe more of a parallel with the point of this essay. India reportedly wants at least $150 billion to start with for infrastructure development from foreign direct investment (FDI). And she also wants foreign institutional investment of $10 billion in 2005 (up from $8 billion plus last year) and $2 billion increments every year on till kingdom come. We’re starting to dare to want but even if the FII comes in the FDI simply won’t. Reason? FDI is rooted money that goes into walls and bridges and needs to be inspired into confidence. And “modern” India can’t have it looking the way she does.

So let’s get Gordon “money never sleeps” Gekko on our team shall we? When I spoke to him today he did this update on his best-known mantra coined for all the post socialist economies that have come out of the closet lately. He said that, for us, specially the mandarins and the political bosses to repeat this (or have it repeated because he knows we have a lot of help in India), at least a million times, maybe a billion times or more, so that we’ve done it for each and every Indian – Wealth is Good. That is the mantra Gekko gave us and he said that it would change everything if we tried to inject the repetitions with faith.

A little startling I admit, because a lot of us, out of good-breeding and leftist leanings tend not to wear this wealth word on our sleeves. On the other hand, Gekko didn’t get to be such a Brioni wearing top-dog high-rolling corporate raider without getting his perception fundamentals right. I decided on balance that it sounds good to me, much better than Greed is Good at any rate even if it did make Gekko infamous in the first place. So I went to the library next to mull things over and providentially came across this piece by the “positioning” guru Jack Trout in which he said, “Perception is reality. Don’t get confused by the facts.” Here’s another one, I thought, who’s been very successful ever since 1968 positioning brands who is saying pretty much the same thing. So where exactly is brand India positioned and what is the perception of it?

At present I’d guess the developed country visitor, which tellingly includes most of our Asia-Pacific brethren in addition to the West, sees India as an over-populated third-world pot pourri, a sort of Egypt with software. He sees chaos, complication, red tape no red super glue everywhere. He can smell the stink of municipal effluent and experience the backbone altering horrors of Indian infrastructure first-hand anytime. He can’t understand why we won’t put the whole of India in the showroom window instead of selling “Incredible India” like some snake-charming fakir dressed as a hopeful mirage complete with forts, elephants, candlelight and red turbans. The perception is that of a quaint old civilization not concerned much with coming up-to-date with destiny. So what happens? The foreigner feels no urge to risk too much of his money in this country. When I ask Gekko what he thinks he says “modern” India needs to up the chant of his Wealth is Good mantra like yesterday.

But Gordon “money never sleeps” Gekko doesn’t want to overdo the pessimism. He says he took a virtual rickshaw into the Indian bazaar, after our last conversation this morning, and he liked a lot of what he saw. There’s Mr. Democracy doing very well thank you and Mr. Judiciary, doing so well that he’s always pushing aside Mr. Executive in his zeal to be defendant, judge and jury himself! He saw heaps of produce in the vegetable and grain markets and mountains of fridges, TVs and all manner of consumer goods selling well. He looked up the ticker and it said the growth rate of the economy is over 6% and climbing. He went by the stock market (how could he resist?) and there he saw FIIs investing in as many as 900 Indian companies everyday - and why there aren’t 900 companies worth investing in daily anywhere else in Asia. But he said, you need to beef it up, this Wealth is Good mantra like now! Look at HSBC, your biggest FII, it’s put in $3 billion in the Indian market, up from $100 million only a couple of years ago but they’ve put the rest of the $35 billion Asia allocation somewhere else. Yes, and I know there are over 500 FIIs registered with you but that tells me the same thing – they’re not investing enough!

Gekko’s been on other people’s minds too. Forbes Magazine put him on the cover of its June 13, 2005 issue in connection with the current concern about global hedge funds. They think Gekko is the presiding deity of the fund managers who manage them hedges and imply that they play-back the Gekko credo every day before they hit the keys: "Greed is good /Greed is right./Greed works./Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit./Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind."

It’s unfair really. If the hedges make a killing Gekko in Brioni looks like a hero and if they fail then Gekko is the bad-guy in the morality play. But the truth is Gekko is a prime example of an attitude the New Yorker calls chutzpah, a kind of Jewish audacity, which can be used everywhere, even India. We just need to update Gekko a little bit. He said so himself. Gekko knows: “the most valuable commodity…is information.”

The word is out there. The world expects India to be wealthy soon and Gordon “lunch is for wimps” Gekko couldn’t have expressed the sentiment better than when he said: “I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun-tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”

With lines like that it’s no wonder Michael Douglas walked with the Oscar for playing Gekko.

(1,109 words)

By Ghatotkach
Sunday, 19th June 2005